Nemesis 4: Death Angel (1996)

A war between man and machine that has raged for more than a century! A war that’s been fought all over the world from the jungles of Java to the wastelands of East Africa! A war that has seen the very fabric of time torn in freaking half like some sort of hapless phonebook owned by gargantuanly muscled she-freak star Sue Price!

Finally, in this fourth and concluding chapter, this war comes to an annihilating conclusion that will answer all your questions, satisfy all your desires, give closure to that eternal conflict between technology and its creators, and generally totally atomize your unworthy ass with its 70 minutes of nonstop talking, standing around, and bodybuilder boobs!

Director Albert Pyun follows up the solidly generic Olivier Gruner action vehicle that was Nemesis and the two bulgingly beautiful sequels (Nemesis 2: Nebula, Nemesis 3: Time Lapse) featuring a white weightlifting chick with cornrows who could barely speak with a film that returns us all to our senses by grossing us out with his over-muscular star frequently getting naked while strutting around the rubble of some bombed out European city.

I guess this is the same woman from the last two movies though her looks and meager acting ability seemed to have totally deserted her. In the previous movies, she at least gave the impression that she was athletic, running and flipping through the air so that she was a credible action hero, even while carrying a lot of muscle on her not gigantic frame.

I don’t know if it was because she was taking off her scuzzy dress or what, but in Nemesis 4 she sort of crossed over into that grotesque category where you wouldn’t even know she was a woman except that she had two grapefruits sticking out unconvincingly from her chest. She looked more ready for the final posedown in the Ms. Olympia competition than battling evil robots from the future.

It’s a good thing for her then that she doesn’t have to worry about the big human/cyborg war anymore! The war is over! There is an uneasy peace between man and machine and Alex, the genetic freak who was going to save mankind and was the subject of a cyborg manhunt has gotten a job as a professional assassin!

Her last job goes wrong, she gets double crossed, and there is a $100 million bounty on her head! Now, she must wait around in the same rubble strewn location for the whole movie until her boyfriend arrives and they can screw until coming up with their own double cross!

Pyun obviously pulls quite a ballsy move with this movie. After laboring to build up all this cyborg vs. human war stuff in the first three movies, he casually dismisses it all so that he can tell an itty bitty character study of a hitman! In the process, he doesn’t wrap up any of the storylines he left open in Nemesis 3. What happened to Alex’s friends and her half sisters? How did she finally escape all the cyborgs after her? How did she get back to her own time? How did her brain damaged muscle hunk mercenary boyfriend Johnny turn into the skinny Europoof Johnny?

It’s impossible to overstate how little actually happens in this movie. There’s three types of scenes. One is the close up of character’s faces where they talk to each other. Pyun simple cuts back and forth between people as they yak. Another kind of scene involves someone, usually Alex, either walking around or sitting down doing nothing. At one point Alex picks up some piece of metal and starts doing some curls. Those days back in Wast Africa when she was fighting Nebula in super slow motion seem a million years ago, don’t they?

The last type of scene is the worst because that’s when we get our cyborg sex! Alex likes to screw before she kills people so we get to watch as some robot’s iron schlong pops out of him and goes inside some opening that Alex has. I wasn’t even trying to figure out what was being inserted where! She also crushes people’s head with her legs during this!

There’s lots of cyborg goo and glop and Alex even gets some of it on her which causes some sort of wound! Either that or the wound was caused by her using the car’s cigarette lighter on the skin with the terminator spew on it. And isn’t it great that even in war-torn Crudistan a hundred years from now, there’s still cars with cigarette lighters!

Alex also keeps seeing a woman dressed in black! Is she the Angel of Death? Is she some sort of morbid harbinger of doom who wants to make sure that Alex hears the cry of the angels when she finally takes her last load of robospunk? Or maybe she’s just some skank in on the double cross who wants to make sure things go according to plan. Who really cares? Alex just eventually shoots her!

With the minimal special effects (a few weakly animated laser blasts, a horribly composited shot of an exploding helicopter, glue-on robot parts and face paint) and the barely feature film length running time, one gets the impression that either Pyun realized Nemesis 4 stunk or he had just lost interest in the whole thing and only made it because it was promised at the end of Nemesis 3. It’s notable that there is no such promise of a Nemesis 5 at the conclusion of this film.

When the end does come, it is bittersweet as the credits play with video clips from not just this movie but the other ones starring Sue Price, reminding us all of a glorious time when Sue could still actually move and engage in low budget action sci-fi hijinks with guys in rubber cyborg costumes instead of the morose sex-addicted psychopath who could barely rouse herself to drop a piece of metal on a guy in Nemesis 4. If you’re watching this and you start to hear those angels cry, pop in your copy of Nemesis 2 and die happy.

Published by monsterhunter

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4 thoughts on “Nemesis 4: Death Angel (1996)”

Amazing. I knew about Nemesis 1 & 2, never thought they managed to film another two! And Tim Thomerson, how old was he in Nemesis 3? He was already more than a bit long in the tooth in the crap “Trancers” movies, so I don’t think he was able to do much in this saga’s entry. What happened to Pyun, though? I should check IMDB.